About
I started Ledger because I kept checking the numbers myself.
Nearly every week a figure goes through the news — a record spending total, a record migration number, a record waiting list — and by that afternoon people are arguing as though it were settled. I used to feel the same jolt of alarm the headline was going for. Then I started going back to the source, and found that the number was usually true while the story being told around it wasn't.
Framing is not the same thing as evidence. That is the whole difference, and it is the reason this site exists.
So I write these down, one topic at a time: what the subject actually is, how it is being put by politicians and the press, what the figures show when you compare them on a like-for-like basis, and where the evidence runs out.
The frustrating part
It isn't that people don't care. It's that checking takes an hour nobody has.
In the age of social media and six-word headlines, a figure becomes a fact the moment it is repeated, and almost nobody is asked — or has the time — to look at what it was counted on. The argument gets settled in the framing long before the evidence is read: a peak year turned into the present tense, a cash total standing in for a share of the economy, a count of pathways reported as a count of people.
So what I want from this is modest. That you leave a page here better informed than the headline left you, and that the record has somewhere to sit that anyone can go and read for themselves, without needing a password or an agenda.
Where a figure hasn't yet been traced back to a primary source, I mark it provisional rather than publish it as fact.
Learning as I go
Honestly, half the reason I check is that I have to.
Migration, budgets, welfare, health — none of it means much until you know how a tax total is actually collected, what a percentage of GDP holds constant, or why a count of applications is not a count of people. That knowledge is never in the article; it is quietly assumed. And some of these topics are genuinely complicated: you need a working grasp of economics or statistics before a figure tells you anything at all.
So every topic here tries to teach you the concept as well as settle the claim, in plain English, with no expectation that you already know it. If the next headline on the same subject is one you can read for yourself, then this has done its job. The terms and ratings I use are set out on the Method page.